Challenges to teaching Global Citizenship Education in Korean Universities: Autoethnography research

• In Event: Peace education and global citizenship education

Proposal

With the advancement of technology, transnational issues have become more prominent, making global citizenship education (GCE) increasingly necessary. GCE is expected to enhance students’ global citizenship (GC), foster solidarity within communities, and help address global challenges (Andreotti, 2014; Banks, 2006). Scholars and international leaders have emphasized the importance of GCE and advocated for its integration into formal curricula. As a result, GCE content has been incorporated into the curricula of various countries, including South Korea (Moon & Koo, 2001), the United States (Rapoport, 2010), and European nations (O'Connor & Faas, 2012).

However, although the policy inclusion of GCE has been successful, the ambiguity surrounding the concept of GCE presents challenges in practice (Goren & Yemini, 2017). Scholars have pointed out that the definition of GCE remains unclear, raising the possibility that teachers may restrict GCE to specific topics such as human rights, global education, development, or multicultural education (Estellés & Fischman, 2021). Consequently, GCE has been evaluated as merely a “simple evolutionary pedagogy model” that incorporates “multicultural education, human rights education, peace education, and environmental education” (Estellés & Fischman, 2021, p. 224).

The previous empirical research has shown how teachers implement GCE in their classrooms, shaped by their socio-cultural contexts and the inherent ambiguity of GCE itself. For instance, Ortloff (2011) examined how German secondary school teachers approach GCE. The study found that these teachers often limit the concept of the globe to Europe; they use a European perspective when explaining global citizenship, and even those who resist Europeanisation find it difficult to move beyond Europe, as the abstract nature of GCE is challenging for students to grasp. Bosio (2024) explored how GCE is framed in Japanese higher education, highlighting features such as “empathetic identification,” “critical agency,” “self-confidence/inclusive mindset,” and “community participation.” These studies demonstrate that the ambiguity of GCE allows for diverse practices to emerge, shaped by local contexts and teachers.

Thus, teacher agency becomes crucial for the GCE application in the actual classroom. While teaching is greatly influenced by personal experience and socio-cultural contexts, the teacher is an agent in deciding what they teach and emphasize, and how they address specific content in the classroom. It is crucial to understand how teacher agency is activated in teaching GCE. However, much of the previous research on teachers and GCE has focused on the perspectives of teachers on GCE and the actual practice of GCE (Goren & Yemini, 2017; Ortloff, 2011). These studies rarely addressed the challenges in GCE pedagogy and how teachers put their effort into overcoming challenges. Furthermore, despite increased GCE in higher education, previous research focused on GCE in secondary school. To fill the gap of the previous research, the current research attempts to shed light on challenges in teaching GEC and how their agency is activated with teacher agency lenses in higher education. For the research, the autoethnography method is adopted by two lecturers teaching in Korean universities. This method benefits the deep understanding of personal experience and interaction among self and others (Chang, 2007).

Findings demonstrate that lecturers attempt to clarify the GCE with specific topics. One strategy is the selection of a single textbook. Additionally, lecturers faced challenges in motivating students to study GCE. In particular, since engineering students tend to be less motivated, GCE lecturers sought to identify common ground between GCE and engineering. Furthermore, they consider students’ backgrounds, such as political orientation and nationality. GCE lecturers also actively promote diversity and avoid making negative statements.

This research explores the agency of GCE lecturers who are teaching in Korean higher education. The contribution of this research can be twofold. First, the GCE lectures are active agents under the situation in the situation of GCE, which is ambiguity. In the process, they also consider the socio-cultural context to overcome the structural barriers in teaching GCE. Second, this research extends GCE research to higher education. Previous research tends to focus on secondary education and curricula; however, this research addresses GCE in the higher education system, which is alienated from GCE research.

Authors

• Kim Jiin, Seoul National University

• Yongshi JUNG